Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false -- distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.

Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story.

Fair Game is the historic and unvarnished account of the personal and international consequences of speaking truth to power.

Valerie Plame Wilson, the former CIA covert operations officer, was born on Elmendorf Air Force base in Anchorage, Alaska in 1963. She holds a bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and master's degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. Her career in the CIA included extensive work in counterproliferation operations, working to ensure that enemies of the United States could not threaten America with weapons of mass destruction. She and her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, are the parents of seven-year-old twins. Ms. Wilson and her family live in New Mexico.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Fair Game

The New York Times

There are some embellishments — the exiled Iraqi doctor (Liraz Charhi) Valerie recruits is a fictional character, as is her brother (Khaled Nabawy), a scientist living in Baghdad — and also a few omissions.

NPR

In Fair Game, Valerie Plame Wilson tells her side of the White House scandal over the leak of her identity. The former CIA agent's cover was blown by a conservative columnist after her husband criticized the Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq war.

AV Club

Ostensibly the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA operative who wrote Fair Game: How A Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed By Her Own Government, Doug Liman’s fact-based drama Fair Game really belongs to Sean Penn, who adds Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, to his gallery of unforgettable characters.

Huffington Post

Daily Kos

Not only did the Bush Administration out a covert intelligence officer working on the most sensitive national security issues in a time of war, but when that officer faced a direct threat to her life and her family's safety because of that public exposure, they did not do a goddamn thing to help.

National Review Online

Breitbart

The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of th...